We must consider the
fact that the presidency of Bill Clinton is illegitimate. Not
for the revelation of a tryst with Monica Lewinsky, but because
he was elected both times with votes from only one-quarter of
the American population. This alone places in serious question
the nature of his governing consensus and the nature of the
mandate that he -- or any other president in recent times
--exercises. It could also be one of the reasons the Ross Perot
revolt of 1992 succeeded in finding a constituency of twenty
million voters who felt disconnected from the process of
consent.

Yet, both consensus
and consent are the primary issues of leadership legitimacy, as
is evident from the recent impeachment politics. In fact, there
are two paradigms at work where the evaluation of President
Clinton’s leadership legitimacy is concerned. One of these is
the personal dimension, and here, the American people have
responded in opinion polls that they do not approve of his
personal life style. However, the other dimension is the public
category, and here they respond with substantial support for the
job that he has done with regard to the promulgation of various
policies -- deserved or not.

Thus, the evaluation
of his leadership amidst the politics of impeachment must take
into consideration these two dimensions that interact to provide
Clinton "the legitimacy to lead."

Clinton derives the
source of his authority to lead both from the Constitution and
from the nature of his public consensus, and it is the
dimensions of both that propel the politics presently at issue
in the impeachment process. The constitutional issue compels us
to ask: "Does lying under oath about consensual sexual
contacts rise to the level of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’
envisioned by the founding fathers?" There are strong
opinions on both sides of this question, as we have seen.

And the public
dimension asks "To what degree does the nature of his
public consensus as determined by Clinton’s favorable ratings
play a role in influencing the politics of impeachment?"
Beyond the opinion polls, the 1998 midterm elections (inasmuch
as the Democratic Party won a significant number of seats,
reducing the size of the political mandate of the Republicans in
Congress and in many states) have resulted in an additional
source of authority (or consensus) reaffirming the President’s
legitimacy to lead. Still, the basis of Clinton’s
"legitimacy to lead" is contested -- and to such an
extent that it has provoked a political crisis.

Leadership and
Legitimacy

There is in the
Clinton saga the problem of leadership legitimacy that applies
with equal vigor to non-governmental interest groups -- in fact,
to all leadership, especially where democratic leadership is at
stake. There is strong emphasis in the leadership literature on
the personal characteristics of individual leaders. Some nods to
"followership" are also evident in the literature, but
without fully exploring the nature of the mutual leader-follower
obligations or specifying the sources of implied consent.
Nevertheless, the Clinton crisis shows us that one of the most
important evaluations of leadership is the crisis of legitimacy,
or the issue of by whose right or consent, does the leader lead:
by right of the political elite in power, or by a national
consensus that is inclusive, even organic?

This question takes
us into the murky waters of the sources of leadership legitimacy
and in this, we are aided by Ronald Heifetz’s construct of
"leadership without authority," which I have called
elsewhere "leadership from the bottom up." It is
useful because it focuses on the inclusive dimension: upon the
nature of the consent of those who would be led and how they
evaluate leadership from the perspective of its objectives,
style and accountability to their interests.

In addressing this
issue, like Warren Bennis I want to question the notion of
"followership" as a severely limited paradigm. It
seems limited in light of the widely accepted view that the
interaction between leader and constituent is captured perfectly
well -- that is, with emphasis on its systemic qualities and its
process-not-position dimensions -- in the concept of
"leadership." The roles of "leader" and
"follower" are too discrete, and ultimately
artificial.

In the first few
pages of his examination of the politics of nonviolent
leadership, Gene Sharp begins by asking the question, "Why
do men obey?" To this he gives various answers, beginning
with Thomas Hobbes’s view that it is out of fear of the
ruler’s power. He continues with a retinue of reasons such as
habit, moral obligation, self-interest, and others. But it
strikes me that this is an offensive question when measured
against the pursuit of democratic leadership.

Rather, I believe
with Arthur Bentley (whom James MacGregor Burns cites) that
"all leadership is group leadership." This truism
applies even to presidential leadership, though it appears that
the individual in this role often has been portrayed as isolated
from collective forces. As Heifetz has suggested, the critical
difference in formal leadership is more often its greater scope.
But still, even for the president, there exists an expectation
of some level of communion with the "American people"
through all sorts of group engagement, either indirectly in the
realm of public policy or directly through personal contact and
their involvement in the process of governing.

Clinton, it should
be observed, felt that he had to apologize to his personal staff
as well as to the American people at large; thus, there was an
explicit group process acknowledged in the pursuit of executive
leadership. So, I want to impose a normative value on Leadership
Studies which recognizes the various kinds of relationships
between leaders and those who consent to their leadership -- a
normative value which distinguishes democratic followers from,
for example, cult followers or followers of political
authoritarian regimes, and which suggests that "good"
leadership is substantially defined by its democratic
characteristics.

An important
consideration here is the nature of the relationship between
those who hold power and those for whom power is held. The
latter we might call "constituents," who are citizens
involved in a dignified and organic relationship with leaders
and who expect an empowering value in return for giving their
consent to be led. This consent must be voluntary, it must be
given with the expectation of reward, it must be based on a
trust that the leadership will be faithful to the objectives and
style of the collective, and it must be predicated on the
understanding that participation and openness will be hallmarks
of the governing process.

In this sense, we
must regard leadership as process rather than a person. And when
we refer to leaders, especially heroic leaders, it may be more
accurate to regard them as one of the factors of monumental
forces involved in historical change, and therefore, as symbols
of those eras of change, rather than as the makers of it
altogether.

Legitimate
Authority

One of the
characteristics of democratic leadership is the issue of
legitimacy that involves more than mere authority. Finite
authority can be delegated, as indicated, by dint of the grant
from superior sources of power such as the Constitution.
Legitimacy, however, requires not only that a source of
authority be obtained, but that trust in the use of that power
is also present largely due to the mutual commitment of leader
and constituent to a common set of norms. So, legitimacy
involves both normative- and process-oriented values.

With respect to
process, trust is important for at least two reasons. First, it
is the glue that binds individuals together in a union of
informal authority to mobilize interests. Second, it is the
implicit quality which demands leadership accountability --
namely, that leaders wield their power and authority in
responsible ways that are consistent with the group’s
objectives and with its stylistic and tactical character.

The other aspect of
legitimacy is that leadership take place, as Max Weber
indicated, within the framework of a common set of norms, mores,
customs, and objectives of living. It is useful to recognize
that legitimacy is based upon norms that are socially valid and
that are truthful and morally grounded to the condition of the
group and its perspective. Leaders are often regarded as
legitimate if they operate within the context of a set of values
that are supported by their community.

Thus, autonomous
actors, possessing a high degree of flexibility with respect to
tactics and to the pace of their agenda’s implementation, may
often draw a "bye" on other elements of the democratic
process because some members of the collective are more
interested in different aspects of accountability. Leaders are
most accountable when they act in the interest of the group from
which they obtained their writ of legitimate authority, as well
as when they employ democratic aspects of leadership, thereby
increasing trust levels.

Still, there may be
various forms of accountability, depending on the degree of the
leader’s independence and the rigor of the sector in which he
works. Some leaders’ lack of accountability may be a
reflection of the fluidity of organizational circumstances. For
others, lack of accountability may be symptomatic of the
scarcity of resources or of the persistence of certain
historical circumstances. Thus, the question often faced by
black leaders -- or by any ethnic or racial subgroup leadership
-- is that, without official state power through which
leadership may be subject to the enforcement of rigorous
standards of accountability, what methods of enforcement are
available and how effective might they be?

Very often, leaders
act as though they had obtained a writ of formal authority that
ordinarily would permit them to operate with the widest grant of
legitimacy. According to Heifetz, though, they often run afoul
because of the expectation that they will act in accord with the
wishes of individuals and groups who are outside the zone of
their immediate areas of legitimacy.

This
"zone-of-consent" problem is important, since it
arises in the context of the majoritarian decision-making
requirements of democratic systems. Thus, when President Clinton
attempted to foster a revolutionary vision of a national health
policy it backfired because he extended his political mandate
outside the zone of his actual legitimacy. In other words, this
was an illegitimate political act. This lends credence to the
nation that leaders are most effective when they operate
according to -- or within -- the zone of the sources of their
legitimacy.

Thus, with respect
to African American leadership, I have devised a racially based
typology which suggests that there are at least four types of
black leaders, according to whether the source of their
legitimacy resides (1) within both the black and white
communities, (2) within the white community largely, (3) within
the black community largely, or (4) in neither community. By
these criteria the leadership styles are listed below:

Style

Example

Consensus

Jesse Jackson

Paternalistic

Colin
Powell

Autonomous

Louis
Farrakhan

Self-appointed

Dick
Gregory

The implication of this typology is that legitimacy is a
resource that governs values and process, but as it is dependent
upon external factors outside the group, it necessarily includes
endorsement and other resource provision. This is a useful
framework which helps to explain the dichotomous attitude toward
some black leaders by both black and white communities.

Illegitimate Leadership

When leadership is not legitimate change
values are engendered. In my book Black Presidential Politics in
America, I noted at the outset that there was a contradiction
inherent in a society where the practice of racism was allowed
and which also professed itself to be democratic. Racism
violated the principle of consent. Our national Constitution
established a republican form of government based on a
majoritarian system of politics, which means that the majority
is expected to be victorious in the passage of legislation or in
the election of individuals to office.

But what, it may be asked, keeps those on the
losing side from regularly exhibiting civil unrest regarding
decisions made by the majority but seen by the minority as
illegitimate? It is a revolving process of consent, in that
those on the losing side today may be on the winning side
tomorrow, and this expectation builds trust in the system as a
fair process. However, what if you knew that as a racial
minority in a racially stratified white dominant social system,
in many points of decision you would be on the losing side? This
would tend to foment distrust, which would lead to unrest and
upset the prospect of civil politics.

So, trust is possible only in a system of
governance -- either at the formal level or the informal level
-- that is perceived to be fair, a circumstance which leads
groups to give their support to leaders in informal systems.

But in fact, there is an element of coercion
here. The French political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau
described this paradox of democracy in the following terms:
"In order that the social compact should not be an empty
formula, it tacitly includes the agreement, which alone gives
force to the rest, that whoever refuses to obey the general will
shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. That means
nothing less than that he will be forced to be free."

So, distrust is engendered by the fact that
those who are in the permanent minority are also forced to go
along with the majority in a process that spoils their free will
and thus their consent, making their view of the use of power
illegitimate.

As I have suggested, the perception that
illegitimate leadership is in power traditionally has set in
motion efforts to effect political change by all sorts of groups
in many societies. In fact, I would argue that in some way, it
has also been responsible for the emergence in America of the
conservative movement that conceives of itself as an historical
corrective to the excesses of the earlier movements for social
change. The pivotal point, however, is that the conservative
movement, as a largely white movement, is not a permanent
minority and indeed has gained majority status as the new
politically legitimate ideology. And in this, there are several
negative effects.

First, with respect to the relationship of
this movement to black leadership, it should be understood that
its endorsement of conservative black leaders reflects the work
of some scholars who have concluded that "endorsement
inhibits change-initiating action." One implication of this
is that external endorsement must either be paralleled or
exceeded by internal endorsement for the values of change to
emerge from the empirical condition of those who desire it. A
more profound implication, however, is that the contribution of
legitimate black leadership is repressed in favor of those new
conservative organizations and spokespersons who represent the
ideology of the dominant class. This sets up a politics of
leadership legitimacy within the black community.

Second, the fact that minority groups who
have a disadvantaged status are trapped in the paradox and
suffer from its coercive effect represents a violation of
democratic norms. For example, by what right is it legitimate
for blacks and Hispanics, the most presumptive beneficiaries of
affirmative action, to be deprived of it by the majority on the
basis of majority rule? Also, it may be asked, is it legitimate
for Hispanics, simply because of their ethnicity, to be deprived
by the majority of language rights and immigration benefits on
the basis of majority rule?

In both cases, vital life objectives and
strategies espoused by the leadership of minority groups are
mitigated in the interests of the white majority in a ruthless,
winner-take-all scenario which certainly cannot be justified as
the definition of an enlightened relationship between minority
and majority leadership.

Multicultural Leadership

In the coming decades, democratic leadership
increasingly will confront the notion of openness, accessibility
and inclusion, or the notion of group agency and consent. As the
country faces the fact that society is constructed not merely on
the basis of individual existences or rights -- except as a
theoretical precept which distributes rights constitutionally --
but also on a rich array of group structures through which
individuals have mediated their interests, a deeper paradox
appears. That paradox lies in the disturbing recognition that
groups too play a role in the consent of the governed, and that
a violation of this consent is the result of coercion.

There is also the irony that such
undemocratic treatment of the political interests of the
minority by the majority not only undermines the project of
democracy for both groups, but is counter to the material
self-interests of the majority. If, as Gene Sharp has suggested,
self-interest is one of the reasons people obey leadership, then
the issue that emerges is that the civil advance of the
multicultural nature of America is the common self-interest of
all Americans.

Demographer William Frey has recently
discovered that ten cities are the destination for 70 percent of
the new mostly Latino and Asian immigrants to America. Since the
white population is leaving most of these cities, the
metropolitan areas are becoming the new multicultural melting
pot, with blacks already there and some Native Americans also
migrating.

Meanwhile, Frey and others have found that
the bulk of the black population is reconsolidating in the South
and the white population is moving into the new cities of the
West and Northwest. It is wholly logical to suggest that the
leadership patterns which will emerge in these areas will
strongly reflect the multicultural character of the population.
But will a struggle ensue over the issue of legitimacy in those
areas as well? Most probably yes, because the bases of the
policy objectives of the residual white suburban middle-class
and the migrants and immigrants who have a much lower
socioeconomic profile will be very different.

Whites, having an older and more affluent
socioeconomic status, will be more interested in such issues as
social security and minimal government service delivery, while
nonwhites will be more interested in expanded government
services and access issues involving a range of opportunities.
How will we resolve this political conflict that is occurring as
we speak?

Democratic Leadership

I would like to return to my earlier
observation about "democratic leadership" to affirm
that the discussion about legitimacy is important in any
political context. Thus, if one takes seriously the issues
involved in national leadership, especially the struggle for its
democratic character and the way in which the various elements
in the relationship of national leadership to the people of this
country have been elaborated by various thinkers as a
participatory value, it strikes me that all leadership is a
political system with these elements present or absent in
relative degrees. An enhancement of this characteristic is the
fact that democratic leadership implies a certain contractual
relationship between agents of the constituents and the
constituents themselves. Since "leaders" are often
agents in a social process of commitment, they are the mechanism
through which the citizenry’s participation is brought to bear
on the political system as a whole.

In the end, though, we must recognize that
even though there may be some congruence between the democratic
practice of an organization and the context of a democratic
state, the immediate values pursued by each may be very
different. For, as Kathryn Denhardt has inferred in her
discussion of the ethics of public service, loyalty to an
administrative system may not translate as loyalty to a given
interest of the public.

So, with respect to values, the struggle
continues to infuse in democratic practice the human content
that is characteristic of what James MacGregor Burns called
"good leadership." In this regard Rousseau
appropriately noted that "in a well-ordered city every man
flies to the assemblies; under a bad government no one is
interested in what happens there."

I suggest that one characteristic of
"bad" governance is the absence of a democratic
practice undergirded by the values of legitimacy, such as trust,
accountability, and consent. But perhaps the summary character
of this value was best expressed by the writer who noted that
the use of authority as power-sharing for the pursuit of
enlightened relationships is an expression of "love."
So be it.

* * * * *

Dr. Ronald Walters is internationally known for
his expertise on the issues of African American leadership and
politics, his writing and his media savvy. Walters carries three
major titles. He is director of the African American Leadership
Institute and Scholar Practitioner Program, Distinguished
Leadership Scholar at the James MacGregor Burns Academy of
Leadership, and professor in government and politics at the
University of Maryland. For the 2000 presidential election
season, Walters also served as senior correspondent for the
National Newspaper Publishers Association and political analyst
for Black Entertainment Television's Lead Story.

Walters is a frequent guest on local and major media as
an analyst of African American politics.

He has appeared on such
shows as CNN's Crossfire and The Jesse Jackson Show, Lead Story
(BET), CBS News Nightline, NBC Today Show, C-Span, public
television shows such as the Jim Lehrer News Hour and Think
Tank, Evening Exchange, radio shows such as All Things
Considered (NPR), Living Room (Pacifica), and many others. Dr.
Walters also writes a weekly opinion column for newspapers and
Web sites.

Walters is the winner of many awards, including a distinguished
faculty award from Howard University (1982), Distinguished
Scholar/Activist Award, The Black Scholar Magazine (1984), W.E.B.
DuBois/Frederick Douglas Award, African Heritage Studies
Association (1983), the Ida Wells Barnett Award, Association of
Black School Educators, (1985), the Fannie Lou Hammer Award,
National Conference of Black Political Scientist (1996),
Distinguished Faculty Contributions to the Campus Diversity,
University of Maryland (1999), and the Ida B. Wells-W.E.B.
DuBois Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the National
Council for Black Studies (March 2000). He was awarded the honor
of "Alumnus of the Year" by the School of
InternationalService of the American University in April 2000.

Walters received his Bachelor of Arts degree in History and
Government with Honors from Fisk University (1963) and both his
M.A. in African Studies (1966) and Ph.D. in International
Studies (1971) from American University. He has served as
professor and chair of the political science department at
Howard University, assistant professor and chair of
Afro-American Studies at Brandeis University, and assistant
professor of political science at Syracuse University. He has
also served as visiting professor at Princeton University and as
a fellow of the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of
Government, Harvard University. He is a former member of the
governing council of the American Political Science Association
and a current member of the Board of Directors of the Ralph
Bunch Institute of the CUNY Graduate School and University
Center. Walters has also served as the senior policy staff
member for Congressman Charles Diggs, Jr. and Congressman
William Gray.

In 1984, Walters served as deputy campaign manager for issues of
the Jesse Jackson campaign for president, and in 1988, he was
consultant for convention issues for the Jackson campaign
directed by former Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown. He serves as
a senior policy consultant to the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and is
consultant to its Devolution Initiative Project and Director of
its Scholar/Practitioner Program.

Ronald W. Walters, one of the country's
leading scholars of the politics of race, who was a longtime
professor at Howard University and the University of Maryland,
died Friday [September 10, 2010] of cancer at Suburban Hospital
in Bethesda. He was 72.

[Ronald William Walters was
born July 20, 1938, in Wichita, Kansas.. His father was a
musician and had served in the military; his mother was a civil
rights investigator for the state.]

Dr. Walters was both an
academic and an activist, cementing his credentials with his
early involvement in the civil rights movement. In 1958, in his
home town of Wichita, he led what many historians consider the
nation's first lunch-counter sit-in protest. Later, he became a
close adviser to Jesse L. Jackson as one of the principal
architects of Jackson's two failed presidential campaigns. "Ron
was one of the legendary forces in the civil rights movement of
the last 50 years," Jackson said Saturday.

Dr. Walters also helped
develop the intellectual framework of the Congressional Black
Caucus in the 1970s. Some of his political ideas, such as
comprehensive health care and a proposed two-state solution to
the Israeli-Palestinian problem, were viewed as radical. A
quarter-century later, they are part of the intellectual
mainstream. . . . Dr. Walters had recently edited a book about
D.C. politics,
Democratic Destiny and the District of Columbia and was
at work on a book about Obama at the time of his death. In an
essay in January, Dr. Walters defended Obama's record in the
face of criticism from the left and the right.—

If the nation’s gross national income—over $14 trillion—were divided evenly across the entire U.S. population, every household could call itself middle class. Yet the income-level disparity in this country is now wider than at any point since the Great Depression. In 2010 the average salary for CEOs on the S&P 500 was over $1 million—climbing to over $11 million when all forms of compensation are accounted for—while the current median household income for African Americans is just over $32,000. How can some be so rich, while others are so poor? In this provocative book, Peter Edelman, a former top aide to Senator Robert F. Kennedy and a lifelong antipoverty advocate, offers an informed analysis of how this country can be so wealthy yet have a steadily growing number of unemployed and working poor. According to Edelman, we have taken important positive steps without which 25 to 30 million more people would be poor, but poverty fluctuates with the business cycle.

The structure of today’s economy has stultified wage
growth for half of America’s workers—with even worse
results at the bottom and for people of color—while bestowing billions on those at the top. So Rich, So Poor delves into what is happening to the people behind the statistics and takes a particular look at the continuing crisis of young people of color, whose possibility of a productive life too often is lost on their way to adulthood.—

I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.

Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.”

We learn how the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar cane have
disrupted and convulsed the planet and will continue
to do so until we are finally living on one
integrated or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of all this
remarkable change will survive the process they
helped to initiate more than five hundred years ago
remains, Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question.

A
notable historian of the early republic,
Maier devoted a decade to studying the
immense documentation of the
ratification of the Constitution.
Scholars might approach her book’s
footnotes first, but history fans who
delve into her narrative will meet
delegates to the state conventions whom
most history books, absorbed with the
Founders, have relegated to obscurity.
Yet, prominent in their local counties
and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly).

Ripostes from proponents, the Federalists, animate
the great detail Maier provides, as does her recounting how one
state convention’s verdict affected another’s. Displaying the
grudging grassroots blessing the Constitution originally
received, Maier eruditely yet accessibly revives a neglected but
critical passage in American history.—Booklist

Bayard Rustin is one of the most
important figures in the history of
the American civil rights movement.
Before Martin Luther King, before
Malcolm X, Bayard Rustin was working
to bring the cause to the forefront
of America's consciousness. A
teacher to King, an international
apostle of peace, and the organizer
of the famous 1963 March on
Washington, he brought Gandhi's
philosophy of nonviolence to America
and helped launch the civil rights
movement. Nonetheless, Rustin has
been largely erased by history, in
part because he was an African
American homosexual. Acclaimed
historian John D'Emilio tells the
full and remarkable story of
Rustin's intertwined lives: his
pioneering and public person and his
oblique and stigmatized private
self.

It was in the tumultuous 1930s that
Bayard Rustin came of age, getting
his first lessons in politics
through the Communist Party and the
unrest of the Great Depression.

A Quaker and a radical pacifist, he went to
prison for refusing to serve in World War II, only
to suffer a sexual scandal. His mentor, the great
pacifist A. J. Muste, wrote to
him, "You were capable of making the
'mistake' of thinking that you could
be the leader in a revolution...at
the same time that you were a
weakling in an extreme degree and
engaged in practices for which there
was no justification."